By: Chioma Madonna Ndukwu
Who Told Us Men Are Less Emotional Than Women?
A woman is crying over an Indian television series. Her husband looks at her, half amused and half bewildered, and reminds her of what seems obvious: it is only a movie.
She knows it is a movie. She is not confused about where the actors live or whether the story actually happened. Yet the tears keep coming.
For many people, this little domestic scene is enough evidence to settle the argument. Women feel too much.
Men, on the other hand, are expected to sit quietly, wipe their faces and approach life with the cool head of reason.
But there is something curious about that conclusion. We have become so accustomed to seeing women express emotion that we sometimes mistake expression for the emotion itself.
We see the tears and assume the feeling must be greater. We see a man sitting quietly and assume there is little happening beneath the surface.
But the human heart is not a glass window. Sometimes, what is happening inside is hidden from everyone else.
Barrister Lords Oluyemi, a Lagos-based lawyer, journalist, media guru and senior lecturer at the National Broadcast Academy, understands why the popular belief persists.
Speaking with me, he pointed to his wife as an example of what he considers a familiar difference between men and women.
He recalled how she can become deeply absorbed in emotional Indian series, sometimes becoming so moved that tears begin to flow.
At such moments, he said, he occasionally has to remind her that what she is watching is simply a movie.
It is the sort of experience many couples would recognise. One partner is wiping away tears while the other is wondering why imaginary people have suddenly become members of the family.
Barr. Oluyemi’s observation is not without a basis. Women, on average, have been found to display emotions more openly than men. But that does not necessarily mean that they experience every emotion more intensely.
And that is where the old argument begins to crack.
In a widely cited 1998 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologists Ann Kring and Albert Gordon compared men and women watching emotional films.
They found that women were more emotionally expressive, but the two groups did not differ in their reports of the emotions they experienced.
The researchers also found that gender-role characteristics and family expressiveness influenced how people expressed emotion. (PubMed)
In simple terms, the woman crying beside you may not necessarily be feeling more than the man sitting quietly beside her. She may simply be showing more of what she feels.
That distinction is important because society has never given men and women equal permission to display vulnerability.
A little girl falls and cries, and someone is likely to comfort her. A little boy falls and cries, and there is a fair chance someone will tell him to wipe his face and behave like a man.
The lesson may sound harmless when repeated once. But childhood is full of repetitions.
“Be strong.”
“Don’t cry.”
“Man up.”
“Men don’t show weakness.”
Eventually, a boy can learn to hide an emotion before he has even learnt how to name it.
Dr Miracle Ihuoma, a clinical psychologist in Lagos, has previously described this cultural conditioning as an important influence on how men handle pain, noting that repeated messages that men should not cry can make vulnerability appear like weakness. (The Guardian Nigeria)
This may explain something we often overlook. A man does not have to cry to be emotional.
He may become angry. He may withdraw. He may work excessively. He may drink. He may become unusually quiet. He may refuse to discuss what happened and insist that everything is fine.
None of these responses proves that he is unemotional. Sometimes emotion does not come with tears. Sometimes it appears disguised as pride.
Consider heartbreak. A woman may call her friend, cry for an hour, talk about the relationship, analyse what went wrong and eventually decide that she needs to move on.
A man may say, “I am fine,” return to work and never mention the breakup again.
Months later, however, he may still be checking his former partner’s social media, becoming irritated whenever her name is mentioned or entering another relationship before he has recovered from the first.
Who, then, was more emotional?
The woman who cried?
Or the man who carried the experience quietly until it began influencing his behaviour?
There is another uncomfortable part of this conversation: anger.
Anger is an emotion, yet society rarely uses a man’s anger as evidence that he is “too emotional”.
A man who shouts during an argument may be described as assertive. A woman who cries during the same argument may be dismissed as unstable.
We have therefore created a strange emotional dictionary in which some feelings are recognised as feelings only when women display them.
A man can be jealous, possessive, wounded, frightened or deeply hurt, but if his response is anger or silence, we may fail to recognise the emotion underneath it.
Research has found that the differences between men and women are also not uniform across emotions.
A study examining responses to different emotional video clips found that the pattern changed depending on whether participants were experiencing sadness, anger, amusement, pleasure, horror or disgust.
In some situations men showed stronger physiological responses, while women reported greater arousal; in other emotions, there was little or no significant difference. (PubMed)
So the question may be too broad.
Are men less emotional than women? Less emotional about what? And expressed in what way?
There is also the assumption that being emotional automatically makes a person less rational. That deserves its own interrogation.
A woman can cry and still think clearly. She can be heartbroken and still examine her finances before leaving an unhealthy relationship. She can be angry and still make a sensible decision.
Likewise, a man can speak calmly while making an extraordinarily emotional decision.
A husband who empties his bank account to prove that he can provide, despite being unable to afford it, may look decisive.
A man who refuses to leave a damaging relationship because his pride cannot accept rejection may appear strong. But strength and rationality are not the same thing.
Sometimes pride wears the suit of logic.
This is why the old “women are emotional, men are logical” argument deserves more than a simple reversal. Saying that men are actually more emotional would only create another stereotype and put a different label on the same old box.
The more revealing possibility is that men and women may experience many of the same emotions while learning different ways of carrying them.
Psychiatrist Dr Sunday Amosu has warned that Nigerian men can be harmed by cultural expectations that discourage emotional expression, arguing that suppressing distress can leave men struggling silently rather than seeking support. (Punch Newspapers)
That silence can be particularly costly because Nigerian masculinity often comes with heavy expectations.
A man is expected to provide, protect, remain dependable and absorb family difficulties without appearing shaken.
But even the strongest roof eventually leaks when the rain refuses to stop.
Perhaps this is why the conversation should move away from asking which sex is more emotional and towards asking whether we have taught both sexes healthy ways to deal with emotion.
Women should not be reduced to their tears. Men should not be reduced to their silence.
The woman crying over an Indian series may simply have a heart that responds openly to a story. The man sitting beside her may have the same capacity for feeling but a different vocabulary for expressing it.
And perhaps that is the great misunderstanding.
We have spent so much time measuring emotion by what reaches the surface that we have forgotten how much can remain underneath.
A tear is visible. A clenched jaw is visible. Anger is visible. Silence is visible.
But the feeling itself? That belongs to a much deeper place.
Maybe men are not less emotional than women. Maybe women are not more emotional than men.
Maybe we have simply become very good at recognising emotion in one gender and overlooking it in the other.
And if that is true, perhaps the question is no longer who feels more.
Perhaps it is whether we have ever really learnt how to see what the other person is feeling.
Maybe we have been reading the signs all wrong. Are men truly less emotional, or have they simply learnt to hide it better? Tell us what you think.
